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“A Prolonged Spring Cleaning” and Other Poems for the Sequester Season

What's on your spring cleaning list? If you're like Carol Flake Chapman, you've discovered that with more time to mull over it, there are more spaces that need it—in house and soul—than you ever knew.

Carol Flake Chapman is a regular contributor to NextTribe. After a stint in academia, where she taught courses in creative writing and women in literature, she turned to journalism, working as writer and editor for several leading newspapers and magazines. She has covered religion and spirituality, culture, politics, travel and nature. Her book, Written in Water: A Memoir of Love, Death and Mystery, tells of her pilgrimage from grief to consolation after the sudden death of her husband on a wild river in Guatemala.

During the coronavirus crisis, she has found consolation in poetry. A collection of the poems she has written over the past few months will be published in June under the title, Maybe We Will All Become Butterflies. 

A Prolonged Spring Cleaning

Maybe it starts with all the hand washing

Well it’s hard to know when to stop

Once you start cleaning and you

Have nothing else to do except eat

So you look around startled at the dirt

Hidden in cracks and crevices you ignored

How did it all accumulate unnoticed

 

You start even vacuuming the past

I have seen the error of my ways

And the dust bunnies under the couch

Come under surprised scrutiny

I’m also rediscovering things I love

And have lost or neglected in my rush

To outrun grief or failure or insignificance

 

How could I have misplaced that turtle pin

How could I have forgotten my Santana album

And how did that birthday card go astray

The one from my mom that plays when opened

If only I could cleanse the past of all its unseemly

Dark spots and blotches and cobwebs of regret

Alas my memories are inaccessible to dust brooms

***

We’re happy to bring you more poetry written about the pandemic. We hope it soothes and centers you during this time.

A Prayer for the Sequestered by Carol Flake Chapman

Apocalypse by Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell

When This is Over by Laura Kelly Fanucci

 

By Carol Flake

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